hi people thanks for all the help obtained.....

now i have another problem.. i have win 2k and suse 10 running in parallel... as root i can acces the files in my windows (NTFS and FAT) drives... but get the permission denied message if i try it as a normal user...
i need to know how to set the permissions for normal users to access any (or all files) in the windows drive...

i used the chmod 777 * for the purpose but dint seem to work... please help...
i wish to access the files till the end of the directory structure in the windows drive.... as a normal user...

thanks in advance

akshay

to access fat and ntfs files from normal user account you will have to change the fstab. To change it open up a Konsole and run kdesu kate /etc/fstab

you will have a file looking similar to this:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / reiserfs notail 0 1
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hda5 /windows/server vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /windows/audio ntfs defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto defaults 0 0

any line with ntfs or fat as type remove what is in the options section and add rw,user,users,auto,umask=0000 so it looks similar to

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / reiserfs notail 0 1
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hda5 /windows/server vfat rw,user,users,auto,umask=0000 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /windows/audio ntfs rw,user,users,auto,umask=0000 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto defaults 0 0

Save this and when you restart the computer the drives will be available to everyone. Fat wil be read/write to everyone NTFS will only be read.

hope that helps

You should not try to write a ntfs filesystem. So the lines in fstab should look like follows:
/dev/hda5 /windows/server vfat ro,user,users,auto,umask=0000 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /windows/audio ntfs ro,user,users,auto,umask=0000 0 0

those trwo sets of lines would make the vfat partition read only aswell, instead of read/write.

any vfat partitions should have rw as an options and ntfs should have the option ro instead.

that should solve the problems and prevent any problems happening if ntfs was attempted to be written to.

thanks ppl i lltry tat out as soon as i log out of stupid(sorry no hard feelings) windows!!!!

akshay